Are Cougars and Mountain Lions the Same? One Cat, Many Names

One species, more than 40 names

The cougar holds a Guinness World Record as the animal with the greatest number of names, with more than 40 in English alone. The reason is its enormous range: it lives from Canada to the tip of South America, so many peoples and languages gave it their own name long before scientists agreed on a single one.

Where the names come from

Cougar comes from a word in Tupi, a language of Brazil, recorded by early naturalists as cuguacu ara. In 1774 the French naturalist Buffon shortened it to cuguar, which English turned into “cougar”.

Puma comes from the Quechua language of the Andes, the language of the Inca. Spanish speakers adopted it, and it entered English in the late 1700s. Puma is now the most common name in scientific literature and the official genus name.

Mountain lion echoes the “cat of the mountain” names used by early Spanish and English explorers. It became popular in the western US, even though cougars do not need mountains and are not lions.

Panther is an old word used for several large cats. In the eastern US it stuck to the cougar, and in Florida the local population is still officially called the Florida panther. Catamount, from “cat of the mountain”, has been used in English since at least the 1660s.

What the scientific name means

Carl Linnaeus described the species in 1771 as Felis concolor, based on a long-tailed cat from Brazil. Concolor means “of one color”, a nod to its plain coat. In 1834 the species was moved into its own genus, Puma.

That genus places the cougar in the subfamily Felinae, the “small cats”, alongside lynxes, ocelots and house cats. Its closest living relatives are the jaguarundi of Central and South America and, more surprisingly, the cheetah of Africa and Asia. Despite its size, the cougar cannot roar like lions and tigers. It purrs instead, and it is among the largest cats that can.

Is a cougar a big cat?

In everyday speech, people often call the cougar a big cat because it is large and powerful. In the scientific sense, however, “big cats” usually means the roaring cats of the genus Panthera: the lion, tiger, jaguar, leopard and snow leopard.

The cougar is instead the largest member of the subfamily Felinae, sometimes called the “small cats”. Some members of that group are anything but small: a large male cougar can outweigh a female leopard or jaguar. What unites them is anatomy, not size, especially the structure of the voice box, which lets them purr but not roar.

How many subspecies of cougar are there?

From the 1700s to the 1980s, scientists named about 32 cougar subspecies, many based on just a few skulls or on where an animal was shot. Genetic studies around 2000 found that most of these were not truly distinct. Cougars in North America turned out to be very similar genetically, probably because they descend from a small group that recolonized the continent from South America after the last ice age.

In 2017, the Cat Classification Task Force of the IUCN Cat Specialist Group recognized just two subspecies:

• Puma concolor couguar: North and Central America, possibly northwestern South America
• Puma concolor concolor: the rest of South America

Under this scheme, western mountain lions, Florida panthers and the extinct eastern cougars all belong to P. c. couguar. Some agencies and older sources still use names such as P. c. coryi for the Florida panther.

Is a Florida panther a different animal?

No. The Florida panther is a small, isolated population of the same species. It is slightly smaller than cougars of the northern Rockies and was once inbred, often showing a kinked tail and a cowlick of fur on the back. In 1995, eight female cougars from Texas were released in Florida to restore genetic diversity, which only worked because they are the same species.

The Florida panther is listed as endangered under the US Endangered Species Act, and is now the only breeding cougar population in the eastern United States. Read more about the East in are there mountain lions in the eastern US?

Names that cause confusion

Because “panther” is used for several cats, it causes mix-ups. A “black panther” is not a cougar: it is a melanistic leopard or jaguar, as explained in is a black panther a leopard? No all-black cougar has ever been confirmed.

The word “lion” also misleads. A mountain lion looks a little like a lioness because both have plain tawny coats, but the two are not closely related, live on different continents and behave differently. Lions live in prides, while cougars are solitary.